The trailer for Amazon MGM Studios’s forthcoming remake of The Thomas Crown Affair was released this week—and a few art historical masterpieces make cameos.
Directed by and starring Michael B. Jordan, the film, which is due in theaters March 5, 2027, tells the story of a high-end art thief. About 12 seconds into the trailer, Thomas Crown, played by Jordan, opens a hidden room behind sliding bookshelves to reveal a private stash of stolen paintings on a museum-style storage rack.
ARTnews identified the four visible works, from left to right, as Francisco Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son (ca. 1820–23), which belongs to the Museo del Prado in Madrid; Henry Ossawa Tanner’s The Banjo Lesson (1893), from the Hampton University Museum; Kerry James Marshall’s Silence Is Golden (1986), from the Studio Museum in Harlem; and Caravaggio’s The Fortune Teller (ca. 1594), from Rome’s Capitoline Museums. Crown is shown holding a fifth canvas to add to the collection, and a little later in the trailer, he is seen attempting to steal a Vincent van Gogh “Sunflower” painting.
The film also stars Adria Arjona as an insurance investigator tasked with catching Crown, and Kenneth Branagh as a rival he targets. Speaking to Variety, Jordan distanced the new film from its predecessors: “I didn’t want a reboot. I wanted a reimagination. The first two films were about rich white guys stealing for fun. That doesn’t land today. Ours is more personal. The stakes are higher. Still got the fashion, romance.”
The original 1968 Thomas Crown Affair, starring American actor Steve McQueen, centered on a bank heist rather than art theft. The 1999 remake, with Pierce Brosnan in the lead, introduced the art-crime premise, with Crown stealing a Claude Monet painting of Venice’s San Giorgio Maggiore from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As Artnet has reported, the film took liberties with the facts: the Met does not own that Monet, which exists in two versions housed in Wales and Japan, and the climactic “museum” scene was actually filmed at the New York Public Library rather than the Met itself.
Jordan is no stranger to art-adjacent scenes on-screen. In Black Panther (2018), his character, Killmonger, confronts a curator inside a fictionalized British Museum stand-in before stealing a Wakandan artifact from a display case. Film heists involving real or invented artworks have a long pop-culture history. The 1962 James Bond film Dr. No, for instance, featured a reproduction of Goya’s Portrait of the Duke of Wellington—a painting that had, in fact, been stolen from the National Gallery, London, the year before and remained missing until 1965.
